Garden Update - June

The garden is doing great. It's 50'x100' and all of it is planted. The squash are "volunteers" that sprouted from some squash that I just left in the garden to rot last summer when we were trying to finish up the house to get moved in. Marc transplanted them and they are huge and producing tons of squash! I am freezing it and taking plenty to work and giving it away. Tonight we'll be having stuffed squash - there were a couple that I let get just a TAD too big...

I've never had such success with green peppers before. The ones pictured are as large as store-bought (chemically fertilized) but these are organic. I guess it's the mushroom compost that is doing it. I used a bunch of these peppers in relish and froze some (halves & diced) and there's more on the plants to be harvested. Dana suggested halving them and freezing to be used for stuffed peppers later. I love convenience foods...

You can see the cucumbers to the left of the peppers, they are long and straight (Marketmore variety) and really nice for dill spears. I made 7 quarts of dill pickles (both spears and hamburger dill slices) and 7 pints of relish this weekend. The relish tastes just like Dell-Dixie brand, a little sweet, just like I like it. The recipe came from the Ball Canning book and it's just called "Cucumber Relish" but contains bell peppers and onions, all of which came from our garden.

Here's a pic of the poultry pen around 8 p.m. before the chickens have gone in to roost. The moon is just coming up and looks pretty cool.

Here's a shot of the house with the moon coming up. It's about 8:30 here. You can see that we don't have a fence or landscaping yet.... maybe someday.